Goodnight My Angel
by the laws of transitivity
Summary: Tabby Boom Boom is known for her screw-ups in the Brotherhood. The latest, with John Pyro , has left her knocked up and without a plan. Tabby/John, mostly friendship. Some John/Bobby Iceman . M for sex, drugs, violence. Movieverse w/ a comic character.
1. The Mistake

Goodnight, My Angel

Chapter 1: The Mistake

Author: the laws of transitivity

Neither of them had been in a good place.

"Wait for it, Tabby! Wait for it!" Toad was screaming in her earpiece, the one she'd let fall out while she was taking down those last two security guards. She placed the bomb in the central control booth and took off down the hall. As she rounded the corner into the north end of the building, she finally bothered to put the earpiece back in. "Tabby! Do you copy? I said wait to place the bomb!"

Tabby skidded to a halt on the north fire escape. She hit her comm device. "Shit."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he barked.

"I already placed the bomb. Get out!"

"You fuckin' stupid bint!"

And then the control booth blew. It was a spectacular explosion, one she would have been proud of in different circumstances.

The helicopter ride back was no picnic. Sabretooth, who scared the ever living shit out of her to begin with, had been almost directly below the explosion. His hair was fried, his skin blackened and regenerating in places. His left eye was swollen shut, but the right was glaring at her enough for the both of them. Toad had gotten out relatively unscathed, but he was still pissed as hell. "We've been staking out those files for six months, Tabby," he reminded her once they reached open water. "Six months down the drain."

"I thought you'd already extracted the files—" she began to protest, but he cut her off.

"Six months! You bloody idiot bitch!"

She heard plenty more of that when they got back to the island. Toad, as her immediate superior, had the responsibility and privilege to knock her around and call her a fuck-up and a lazy tramp before sending her off to re-build her self-esteem with booze and men. She'd gotten damn good at covering up bruises with make-up. When in doubt, big battered-housewife sunglasses were in style.

She ended up on the mainland, in a bar. A guy with a buzz cut and a lip ring bought her drinks—shots, mostly vodka, maybe some tequila—until she let him finger her in a booth in back. Afterward, she dragged him into the men's room. He pulled some coke out of his coat pocket and made some lines on the grimy bathroom sink because she was too drunk to make them. She gave him head in the handicap stall. He called her a sexy little tramp, and around 1 AM, she stumbled out of the bar, keyed up and out of it and not feeling any better about herself.

Magneto had shitty little apartments scattered all over the world for Brotherhood members to hide out in. Most of them were single bedroom with little more than a bed, medical supplies, and nonperishable food, but the ones in New York City, the ones they used all the time, were much nicer. They had couches and real food and one of them had a TV with pirated cable. When Tabby finally made it to the Brooklyn apartment, John was already draped over the couch, clothes rumpled and drunk off his ass.

"Party boy," she teased. Tabby slid over the back of the couch and sat on his legs.

John sat up, one arm circling around her middle and the other hand tracing up her thigh and playing with the hem of her skirt.

She raised an eyebrow at him. "What did you do tonight, Johnny bear?"

He nuzzled at her neck. "Went to a club. Did some E. Fooled around with a couple people." By "people," John meant girls and boys. Tabby teased him sometimes, said Johnny wasn't bisexual, he was sex-sexual.

Snickering, she pushed a hand through his hair and made a face. He used too much gel.

Tabby remembered that part very clearly, but the after there it got hazy. She didn't remember when they started to kiss or who initiated it. She remembered unbuttoning his pants, straddling his thighs. She didn't remember how they ended up on the floor, but she remembered wondering if she would have rugburn on her ass the next morning (she would). She remembered that John said "Bobby" when he came inside of her and started crying afterward. She didn't remember how she John ended up on the couch and she ended up in bed, sticky, still drunk and still not feeling any better about herself.

"Heard you fucked up the mission yesterday." This was the first thing he said to her the next morning that was anything more than a pained moan. The two of them sat hunched over coffee mugs while the painkillers kicked in. He was wearing yesterday's clothes, gel-goopy hair sticking up like a birds' nest and face still sporting the pattern from the couch pillows.

Tabby just stared down at her coffee and shrugged.

"What time did you get in last night?"

Her head snapped up, bloodshot eyes suddenly wide. "You don't remember me coming in?"

John snorted. "I hardly remember me coming in, to tell you the truth. I was really out of it."

"I noticed." She blushed. "About that…"

"It was Bobby," he told her, thinking she wanted an explanation, "again."

Of course it was. After a night of drunken bonding—not last night's God-touch-me-there bonding, but a deeper, I-love-you-man sort of bonding—Tabby had managed to get a detailed synopsis of The Johnny and Bobby Soap Opera, all seven seasons. They'd been fucking behind closed doors since they were fourteen, even when Bobby got a girlfriend and taking just a brief hiatus after John left the X-Men to get away from him. They'd been meeting up in motel rooms sporadically to fuck and not talk about it and make each other miserable. Oh, they were both risking their necks fraternizing with the enemy, but, oh, it hurt so good. That sort of shit. Tabby hated Bobby almost as much as John did, which was almost as much as John was ass-over-brains in love with the shit.

"I told him it was over," he mumbled.

"Again," Tabby supplied.

John glared at her. "Anyway, I don't really wanna talk about it. It's just…complicated."

She took that as her sign to forget about last night. They didn't need more complicated.


	2. What You've Been Trying to Say

Goodnight, My Angel

Chapter 2: What You've Been Trying to Say

Author: the laws of transitivity

"Hey, Tabby, can I talk to you?" John hesitated in the doorway.

Oh good, Tabby thought, he remembers. If he remembered what had happened between them, maybe he would actually believe her when she pulled out the little positive pregnancy test she'd been staring at for the better part of the morning.

All the signs were there: the nausea, the missed period, the mood swings. Tabby had been around the block a few times. She knew what it meant and she wasn't surprised when that angry little plus sign grinned up at her from the bathroom counter.

The thing was, she was always so careful for just this reason. (And because crabs had sucked and she was so not on board for any of those other nasty diseases you could get. ) Her birth control had run out a week before she and Johnny had hooked up, and she'd really been meaning to get it refilled. He was the only one she'd actually done it with since then, though. There could be no mistake. The fetus was his.

John gave her a sheepish smile, completely unaware that as they spoke his sperm was growing and morphing into a freakish alien-looking wad of cells in her uterus.

She smiled back. "Yeah, sure. What's up?" She scooted over on the bed to make room for him, setting down the book she'd been reading, _The Catacombs of Temptation_. A real page turner.

John sat down beside her, cross-legged, and picked up the book. "I haven't read this one yet. Can I borrow it when you're done?"

"Yeah, just keep your spunk off of it this time," she snorted, trying to loosen up. "So…"

"So don't kill me," he said.

Tabby raised an eyebrow. "Why am I gonna kill you?"

"Well, I went to see Bobby today…"

"John!"

"Hear me out!" he insisted, holding up his hands defensively. "I didn't want to go see him. I told him I didn't want to, and he said he had to tell me something important—"

"You are _such_ a pushover—"

"—so I went to meet him at this motel we go to sometimes—"

"Oh, God…"

"—and he says he doesn't expect me to want anything to do with him anymore—"

"At least he's not a total idiot—"

"—but he finally left Rogue."

Tabby opened her mouth to speak, but cut herself off, stunned.

"I know," John said with a nod. "He left her and told her he'd been cheating on her."

"Oh my God."

"I know."

"Oh my _God!_"

"I _know!_"

"So what did you say?"

John rubbed at his neck anxiously. "Well, y'know, I was kinda jumping his bones at that point, so I didn't say a whole lot on the subject…"

"Oh, John, you didn't!" she sighed. The boy was hopeless.

"Come on, he finally left her! This could actually work this time!"

"Yeah, except you still have to keep it secret unless you want to get killed! Listen, Johnny, you know this relationship will never go anywhere. You're just going to be fucking in motel rooms until one of you ends it again."

John shook his head. "Or until we get out of all of…" He gestured at the room around him. "…this shit. The war won't last forever, and…and I love him. I can wait until it's over."

Again, Tabby opened her mouth and nothing came out but a sigh. She scooted closer to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. "Oh, Johnny…"

"I'm lucky to have you, Tabs."

And she meant to tell him. She really did. Her mind wandered to the bathroom counter where the test sat, waiting to be revealed. It just never happened.

So now that she had failed to tell Johnny about the pregnancy, the plan was to abort it in a discrete and efficient manner. Simple, right?

See, the thing was that Tabby didn't have a lot of friends in the Brotherhood. Magneto was crazy and had this God complex like she couldn't believe. Mystique was a bitch to everyone. Vic and Toad were real assholes, though John had always had that easy hanging-with-the-guys thing going on with them. Vic ignored her completely. She and Toad had fucked a couple of times when she'd first gotten there, but his tastes were a little too freaky even for her. Now, he just trained her and smacked her around when she fucked up. John…well, she and John bickered like crazy, but he really was the best friend she had. Ever since he and Bobby started making things work, though, he was _never_ around and the Brotherhood Island was just this big, empty, lonely thing.

So she started talking to the baby.

She hadn't meant to. After running laps and cleaning the dishes (Wednesdays were really Vic's day, but he scared the shit out of her, so she did them anyway), she dropped down onto her bed and closed her eyes, hand sliding down to her abdomen.

"God, what am I even doing here, kid? You're lucky you don't have to stick around to find out what this place is like, you know?"

The next morning, she sat down on the bathroom floor, wiped her mouth, and said, "If you don't stop making me nauseous, I'll…well, I'm gonna abort you either way, but if you're good, I'll ask them to make it quick and painless, okay?"

All of her complaints, her worries—the baby heard them all:

"What an ass."

"What am I doing here?"

"I can't handle this."

"What the hell do they want from me?"

Watching John run off to meet Bobby, she sat in the hangar, rubbing her belly, and asked, "Do you think he's making a mistake?" She glanced down at her hand. "Your daddy's kind of an idiot. Between the two of us morons, you might end up retarded."

After training one morning, Toad screamed at her for a good half hour. He didn't even hit her, just called her worthless, pathetic. Told her she was an idiot whore. When she went back to her room, she just lay there, hugging her stomach, knowing that someone wanted her, even needed her.

She kept putting off making the appointment until she'd forgotten the plan altogether.

Oops.


End file.
